When there is a crisis incident in a populated area, there is often a high risk of injury or loss of life. For example, an active shooter incident in a school, office, shopping mall, public park, or other area can put many lives in danger. Coordinating a response to a crisis incident that is rapid, efficient, well-planned, and well-executed can appreciably reduce the likelihood of severe injury and loss of life. However, such a coordinated response can be difficult to implement, particularly when the crisis incident is unexpected, and/or when the first responders are not experts in crisis response.
Some organizations develop and coordinate response plans with emergency responders, such as with private security guards, police and fire personnel, medical personnel, and others in an attempt to improve the effectiveness of crisis response in their facilities. Such cases, however, tend to rely on effective and accurate manual intervention, and the effectiveness of such intervention can depend highly on a number of factors. One factor is the training of staff, and/or the availability of trained staff, with respect to the crisis response plans. Another factor is how quickly and/or successfully emergency responders are able to reach and access the facility or facilities in crisis. Another factor is how much and what type of real-time information relating to the crisis is available to those in crisis and those responding to the crisis.
In limited instances, certain sensors can be used to provide an automatic response to a particular type of incident. For example, a fire or power outage may cause fire doors in a building automatically to close. However, such automatic responses tend to be very limited in effectiveness, and typically cannot adapt to multiple types of incidents or to changing parameters of an incident. For example, an automatically closing fire door can impede people's efforts to quickly escape a dangerous incident, and/or emergency responders' efforts to respond to the incident.